


After the Long Winter, Spring

by tetsubinatu



Category: Merlin (BBC), Merlin (BBC) RPF
Genre: M/M, RPF, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-17
Updated: 2011-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 20:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tetsubinatu/pseuds/tetsubinatu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin awakens confused and very far from home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Long Winter, Spring

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a kinkme_merlin prompt [here](http://community.livejournal.com/kinkme_merlin/1108.html?thread=252756#t252756).

"Merlin," the voices murmured, "Merlin, merlin, merlinmerlinmerlinmerlin"

All the long winter they had murmured at intervals, but now the murmur had surged to something almost painful in its intensity. It wouldn't STOP!

Merlin opened his eyes and breathed.

PAIN!

He would have screamed if he had had lungs to scream with, and then at last he did. As his body wavered and coalesced from its wooden prison into flesh and - Gods, pumping like sap but faster, so much faster - BLOOD - at last he could scream.

He woke, cold - and how long was it since he had been cold - hungry (or hungry) and alone. He had to find Arthur.

* * *

The world was strange. So hard, so crowded. It smelled wrong - like a barn at the end of winter, but unnatural - not the normal smell of too many animals confined for too long but more like the reek of the tannery or the dye-vats. Or like smoke.

He grew used to it.

There were still roads, and still the hills had power under them. The ley lines were distorted, twisted, but they still held enough power for him to translate the strange words that the people of Albion now spoke. And his name - that too was a little strange, a little distorted, but they spoke it everywhere. No wonder he had woken. Merlin and Arthur, Morgana and Guinevere. Only Gwenhwyfar's name had changed to near-unrecognisability. Even Uther was remembered.

The people could be kind - people had always been kind - and cruel, as they had always been. Some people gave him money when they saw that he was hungry. Some took him in and gave him a bed for the night, but he always had to go in the morning.

No-one used magic. Merlin thought that it was not just from caution - people _spoke_ easily enough of magic - but he waited and waited, and he never sensed another sorcerer. On the telly that was so ubiquitous he sometimes heard it spoken of, and soon after his first night under a roof in over a thousand years he saw why the voices had woken him.

He was in a telly show! The boy playing him was... not unlike him, actually. Taller, of course. All the people now were taller. He had been tall in Camelot, but now he was... average, he thought. But the boy had the celtic looks, and the blue eyes. The way they went gold in the show was ridiculous, but then... these people were so ignorant about real magic. It was, he couldn't find the word - heartbreaking? So far he was from his home, and so alone.

One day he found himself in a wood. He liked woods. In a wood he could almost be at home, apart from the endless buzz of machinery that even the deepest woods could not exclude and the taint of the air. He was lying face-down in blue-bells, drowning in their scent, unchanged over the millenia when someone called out to him.

"Hey, Mate? You all right there?"

 

* * *

He still followed the voices instinctively. He thought that that was probably what had led him to this place, this wood where they were making the telly show which bore his name.

"You can't stay here, mate. They're filming here," the man said gently as Merlin looked around. Merlin looked at him. He was very handsome, in a saxon sort of way. He looked like the man who played Arthur in the show. "Are you...?" he asked.

The man nodded. "I'm Bradley. Have you seen the show?"

Merlin nodded. "Sometimes they let me sleep inside, and there's always a telly," he said. "You don't really look like Arthur, you know."

"I don't?"

"No. He was Roman, you know. The people called him Arthur, but his family called him Artos. He looked more like that man who played Lancelot, I suppose, but stronger."

Bradley looked at him, his face solemn. Merlin supposed that he was giving the impression that he was mad again. Perhaps he WAS mad a little. A millenium as a tree will do that to a man.

"I suppose I should stop saying things like that and learn to blend in," he said sadly. "I wish I could find Arthur, but I can't feel him anywhere."

He looked at Bradley, who was biting his cheek. "I shouldn't have said that either, should I?"

Bradley shook his head. "Not if you want people to take you seriously," he said. "Um, you're homeless, right?"

Merlin nodded. In all the world there was no-one as homeless as he, he thought.

"What's your name?"

Merlin thought about it. It probably wasn't a good idea to say 'Merlin' to this boy, but perhaps... "Myrddin," he said.

"Murthen?"

Merlin nodded and the man regarded him suspiciously. "Like the welsh form of Merlin?"

Merlin hadn't thought that he would know that. He shrugged.

Bradley stuck out his lip in a ridiculous considering pout. "You got any weapons on you, Myrddin?"

Merlin shook his head and held out his arms in the universal symbol for 'unarmed and not dangerous'.

"Would you like something to eat?"

Merlin smiled. Good lad. "Yes please!"

 

* * *

Lunch was sandwiches - ham and cheese - and Bradley brought him a sweet drink which he said was a cordial. Merlin often forgot to eat and he thought it had been a while. His magic sustained him, but food was a better way to go about it really. He knew that.

The man who played Merlin came wandering over after a while. "Bradley says you're Myrddin," he said in a pleasant voice.

Merlin smiled, nodding. "Your voice," he said, "Where are you from? It sounds like home."

"I'm from Northern Ireland, Armagh," the man said. "I'm Colin, by the way." He stretched out his hand and Merlin took it, as was polite these days.

"You don't sound Irish?" Colin continued. Merlin thought about it.

"I don't really know where Northern Ireland Armagh is," he confessed. "I just like your voice. The way they speak these days is so odd; cold almost, don't you think? You sound warm to me."

Colin looked a little taken aback. "Um. Thanks. You don't look that old, though."

Merlin had wondered about that. He looked about twenty to himself. "How old do I look to you?" he asked curiously.

"About my age, I suppose," Colin said. "Not a teenager, somewhere in your twenties."

Merlin nodded. The people these days looked young for longer, he thought. Good food, easy living.

"Do you know how old you are?" Colin asked. "What year were you born?"

Merlin had been born the year Uther won his kingship. It didn't have a number, the way they did these days. "I'm not sure," he said. "It didn't matter back then."

He watched the filming all day. From time to time Bradley and Colin came over to check on him, but he was content to sit there and finish off the sandwiches and biscuits that were apparently free to anyone who wanted one. At sunset it started to rain and the cameras disappeared into vans faster than he would have believed possible. "Come on," someone called to Bradley, and Bradley looked at him a little blankly.

"Do you have somewhere to stay?"

"It doesn't matter," Merlin said. The rain was cool and refreshing. He held his face up to it, welcoming its gentle benediction.

Bradley took his hand and pulled. "You can't stay here in the rain," he said, and then he argued with the van driver until they let him squish in with them back to the nearest town.

"Would you like a shower?" Bradley asked when they were at his room.

Merlin didn't like showers much. He wrinkled his nose. "Bath?" he suggested, because he knew that he did smell pretty bad compared to these fastidious people.

Bradley grinned and went to run it for him. "You're pretty thin," he said as he came out of the bathroom. "I'll see if Colin can spare you a pair of his ratty jeans. What you've got on needs a wash." He knocked on a door that Merlin had taken to be a cupboard and went into what must be Colin's room. Merlin could hear some discussion, but there was no hint of argument about it, so he felt comfortable to wander in after Bradley.

Perhaps he shouldn't have. Bradley was _kissing_ Colin. Merlin blinked.

"Sorry mate, I was just coming back," Bradley said easily. "Colin'll set you up with some clothes."

Colin looked a bit more flustered than Bradley had. "Yeah. Um. Let me just have a look."

"I don't really need clothes," Merlin said. "If I just wash these in the bath after I've finished I can have them dry in no time."

"Pajamas, then?" Colin asked.

Merlin wasn't sure what pajamas were, but when Colin held them up he recognised them as clothes for sleeping in. "I usually sleep in my clothes," he said. "Or naked if it's hot enough."

"You can't sleep naked here," Colin protested. "Just put them on after the bath, OK?" He shoved them nervously at Merlin, who took them because it seemed important to Colin.

"OK," he echoed, and went back in to see if his bath was ready.

 

* * *

Bradley told him to sleep in the bed in his room. "I'll share with Colin tonight," he said, utterly shameless.

Merlin looked at him wistfully. "Is that acceptable these days?"

Bradley's jaw tightened. "Do you have a problem with it?" He looked quite angry - Merlin hadn't seen him angry before. He seemed to take life so lightly, this handsome man, but not so lightly as to abandon a homeless man to a night in the woods in the rain.

"I apologise if I have given offense," Merlin said, and the old ways came back so strongly to him that he almost felt he might give a courtly bow to Bradley, as he would have in Camelot. His head, for a moment, felt clear.

"I assure you that no offense was intended. I was, I suppose, jealous."

Bradley's face softened. "I see," he said. "No offense taken. Goodnight, Myrddin."

The door closed behind him with quiet finality.

 

* * *

Merlin woke screaming, again. But this time friendly hands held his shoulders. "Wake up, Myrrdin. It's just a dream," Colin was saying. "Just a dream. Wake up."

A millenium without Arthur was far, far too long, and yet the memories were too fresh. "Artos!" he cried, in his own language which was now only known to a few scholars, dry and dead. "My Artos, come to me!"

They held him as he cried. "I will find him," he told them, when he had regained some composure. "He must be here somewhere."

"Of course you will," Bradley said. "You'll find him one day."

And when he did, in this strange new world, Merlin thought that he might see if, maybe, this time Arthur would kiss him.

Beside him, warm and unlooked for, Bradley and Colin slept entwined.

There could be worse ways for Camelot to be remembered.


End file.
